Dracula in Love

Prologue

Everyone has a secret life. Perhaps yours is merely a gossamer web of thoughts and fantasies woven in the hidden furrows of your mind. Or furtive deeds performed on the sly or betrayals large and small that, if revealed, would change how you are perceived.

Unlike most people whose lives remain private, my story has been written by another, sold for money, and offered to the public for entertainment. The author of the fiction claims to be above reproach because his records are “exactly contemporary.” But these “records” are falsified documents, based on the lies of a cabal of murderers desperate to conceal their dark deeds.

The true story remains a secret-my secret-and with good reason. Reader, you are about to enter a world that exists simultaneous with your own. But be warned: in its realm, there are no rules, and there is certainly no neat formula to become-or to destroy-one who has risen above the human condition. That is wishful thinking. Despite what you have read in commercial fiction, in the supernatural world, science and religion are both ineffectual, and garlic, crosses, and holy water-no matter how many times it has been blessed and by whom-are equally useless and benign. The truth is deeper, darker, and stranger than you imagine. As Lord Byron wrote, “for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction: if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!” In the forthcoming pages, we shall see what is gained when truth is told.

At some risk to myself from mortals and immortals alike, I will now reveal to you what happened in that strange and seminal year of 1890, when I shed the cocoon of ordinary life, bursting through the membrane of prosaic earthly existence and into a world of preternatural magnificence. That is the world we learned as children to fear-the milieu of goblins, ghosts, spirits, and magic-when it is the tangible world that is rife with unimaginable horrors.

The truth is, we must fear monsters less and be warier of our own kind.

Mina Murray Harker, London, 1897

P. S. The astute reader will notice that I have employed herewith the same fictitious names used in the other tale, with the exception of Morris Quince, who in no way resembled the cowboy American stereotype Quincey P. Morris, and Dr. Von Helsinger, who was not a product of Amsterdam but of Germany, the world’s leader in psychiatry during our century.